Hollow fibre membranes have been widely used in the fields such as water treatment, biological separation and air filtration. The typical manner for constructing a hollow fibre membrane module is to amount a bundle of hollow fibre membranes into a bearing shell, then fix the ends of the bundle. However, such manner of directly amounting the bundle into a shell easily causes the fibre membranes knotted and disordered.
The directly fixed membrane module has been improved. Some improvement are to cover a net-like protection layer on the bundle, and others are to separate the membranes into several bundles with separators. Although the above improvements have a certain protection effect on the membranes, they easily damage the bundles, and cannot well solve the problems existing in the distribution of water stream and collection of the produced water, which tend to resulting the breaking of the membranes and the low filtrating efficiency. When the diameter and the length of the membrane module are larger, the above problems are more obvious.
To solve the above problems, someone have proposed to add a water distributing device at the end of the bundle, so as to distribute water, and fix the water distributor, bundle and shell together through bonding. However, this method still has the problem of nonuniform water distribution.
Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop a hollow fibre membrane module with a reasonable structure, which has more reasonable and efficient water stream distribution and produced water collection, improved hollow membranes availability, and higher filtration efficiency.